Pippa Middleton's handbag offers a modern morality tale

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/27/pippa-middleton-handbag-not-a-bargain

Version 0 of 1.

Having been on a reading jag for the past couple of weeks, I am brimming with book recommendations. Unfortunately, according to newspaper tradition, people only ever want to see those lists in December and July.

I will tell you, however, that Rupert Everett's latest volume of autobiography, Vanished Years, contains the lines: "On my way home I pop into one of my favourite bars for a drink before dinner. Unbeknownst to me, it is Nude Sunday."

If you don't want to read on after those words, I can't help you.

Alongside that gripping work, I have raced through four novels, three memoirs and the picaresque tale of Pippa Middleton's handbag.

That last story was published episodically, like 19th-century Dickens. And, like 19th-century Dickens, it veered between wealth and poverty, glamour and gloom, shimmering with dramatic twists and silly names. Teasingly, with a masterful control of narrative pace, the press has been leaking instalments gradually over a fortnight.

Chapter One: the Modalu London handbag company announces that sales have leaped from £10,000 a month to £500,000 since it named one of its designs "the Pippa" in honour of the shapely royal sister-in-law who was seen carrying it.

I am not, generally, a fan of handbags with women's names. I find the principle twee and embarrassing. I don't need to form a personal relationship with the thing I keep my keys in. It's not a bloody pet. I don't want to call my handbag "Roxanne" or "Betty" any more than I want to call my knickers Sandra. How infantilised can female shoppers be? I don't hear men getting excited about rushing out to buy a nice new pair of Brians or a smart striped Armando.

Nevertheless, this was a happy story: as branches of Jessops, Comet and HMV were crumbling all around, spewing out job losses and defunct Christmas vouchers as they went, here was a British business announcing a recession-bucking 5,000% boom!

As far as twee monickers go, at least "the Pippa" wasn't a mere flight of patronising fancy, but named after a real person who chose the item of her own volition – like the original Kelly bag, named after Princess Grace was snapped holding one shyly in front of her pregnant stomach.

Chapter Two: it is revealed that Pippa's handbags were freebies, given to her by the company in four different colours. This stoked the purse-lipped disapproval of the press (God forbid the woman should buy her own stuff, having been paid a mere £400,000 for a book revealing that the secret of turning raw sausages into cooked ones is to switch the oven on). Out came familiar barbs about the Middleton family's "mercantile instincts" and "social climbing", and poor Pippa, like her near-namesake in Great Expectations, learned a hard life lesson about snobbery.

Call me an old hag knitting at the scaffold (I've been called worse), but I sensed another grim twist coming. You know that sense of doom you feel when the jolly story you're reading starts to hint at misery to come? There were a few days before the next instalment, but we somehow knew what it was going to be…

Chapter Three: yup, the handbags are made in India by factory workers earning a few pence an hour. The newspaper with the scoop was careful to point out that these are not actually sweatshops, but an attendant photo of a gloomy-faced Indian seamstress clutching a now ridiculous-looking £225 violet satchel, all zips and western self-indulgence, told its own story.

And yet, before we assume that the moral of the tale is "There's no such thing as a free handbag", or "Big business is evil", let's just pause to look at the slogan of the company, from its website: "Quality and style don't have to cost the earth."

This is not intended to carry a double meaning about environmental concern; they are just saying their handbags are inexpensive. The newspaper quoting this slogan did not question its principle. It is apparently accepted by journalists, the company, and – of course – the buyers that £225 (or, in the case of "the Pippa", £195) is cheap for a handbag. The discrepancy between that price and the wages earned by the factory workers was pointed out, of course, but nobody has actually said: Have we gone mad? Since when can a company selling two hundred quid handbags advertise itself as the bargain option?

This is not solely the fault of the company. They wouldn't say it if it didn't work. So the moral of the story has got to be about us. Us and our lame credulity.

The day that £1,500 handbags stopped being an obscenity and became friendly little pets with names, photographed out of all proportion to the number of them actually in existence, talked and written about as if they have any relevance to normal people, we began our dumb glide into a world where a £200 version was cheap consolation. The prudent choice. The canny purchase.

We fell for an obvious trick. The stitch-up between designers, fashion mags, style pages and a certain sort of image-led celebrity to make four-figure shoes and bags seem genuinely desirable (how many times have you read about a "waiting list" for something astronomical from Hermès?) was never about getting us to buy those things.

It was about making us believe that we are being clever by spending £200 on something similar. It was about making us forget that £200 is the crazy price, the special-birthday price, the luxury option, and £30 is the canny purchase.

The only difference between us and the Indian women earning 17p an hour is that they actually realise they're being exploited.

www.victoriacoren.com